62 MAMMALIA 



out to the back country, turned out and fed for a time, till they were 

 established. No doubt some died, but most became more or less 

 wild and learned to subsist on the smaller animals of the neighbour- 

 hood. They certainly destroyed many young rabbits. They cleared 

 off the rats which were formerly so common, they also largely 

 exterminated native lizards, and did much to destroy many native 

 and introduced birds. Mr Chas. J. Peters, of Mount Somers, considers 

 that wild cats are far more effective in keeping down rabbits than 

 stoats and weasels, and estimates that a cat will kill more rabbits 

 in a month than one of the others will in six months. Dieffenbach, 

 writing of the Piako district (Auckland) in 1839, says: "the cats 

 which, on becoming wild, have assumed the streaky grey colour of 

 the original animal while in a state of nature, form a great obstacle 

 to the propagation of any new kinds of birds, and also tend to the 

 destruction of many indigenous species." This statement about the 

 colour of wild cats has been made much of. It is only true to a limited 

 extent, and I have always felt that such statements coming from a 

 traveller who had only limited means of observing the facts, and who 

 apparently founded his conclusions on a few isolated observations 

 of the settlers, are not always safe to generalise from. In this instance 

 they led Darwin (in The Variation of Plants and Animals under 

 Domestication) to quote him, and to use the statement as a proof of 

 the strong tendency to reversion shown by the cat when it escaped 

 from domestication. At the time Dieffenbach wrote, settlement was 

 quite in its infancy, and cats had not long been introduced. It is 

 probable, therefore, that his statement, whether the result of his own 

 or other people's observations, referred to cats which were themselves 

 the progeny of grey animals. It certainly is the case that in Central 

 Otago, where cats were freely liberated to cope with the rabbit pest, 

 animals of many colours are now found wild 1 . 



Mr Robert Scott, M.P. for Otago Central, who had exceptional 

 opportunities for observing the facts, has recently given me most 

 interesting information regarding this question. He says : 

 the wild cat was no doubt the descendant of the shepherds' and miners' 

 tame cat. The predominating colour was grey-striped, or tiger-striped as 

 some people called them, occasionally yellow, and rarely black or black 

 and white. The time I write of was the seventies, say from 1870 on to 

 the time when poisoning the rabbits with phosphorized grain came in. 

 The cats, though not numerous, were fairly common especially in districts 

 where cover, such as fern and scrub, was plentiful. They grew to an 



1 In a paper entitled "Red Cats and Disease" (Trans. N.Z. Inst. xxxi, p. 680), 

 Mr Richard Henry refers to the occurrence of distemper among wild cats at Mana- 

 pouri Station in 1881, and states that red cats which were always males seemed 

 to survive, when those of other colours succumbed to the disease. He also states 

 that cats which live wholly on rabbits are very liable to disease. 



